This document discusses new tools for digital humanities and spatial data. It describes how physical discovery of manuscripts led to new methods of transmission and preservation of information over time. Modern libraries are indexing resources through internal catalogs and digital objects. The text advocates for moving resources on the semantic web using linked open data with RDF to better integrate geographic data and connect projects. The future of catalogs may involve direct access to digital resources through APIs, linked open data, and graph databases to allow deeper analysis of content and spatial indexing of metadata.

1. New Discovery Tools
for Digital Humanities and Spatial Data
MIT July 2014
Merrick Lex Berman
Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard

2. Physical discovery finding {scrolls}
John Willis Clark, The Care of Books (Cambridge, 1901).
Paul Pelliot at the Mogao Caves, Dunhuang (1908).

3. Transmission reading {texts}
John Willis Clark, The Care of Books (Cambridge, 1901).
The Emperor and the Assassin (1999).

4. Bound and chained preserving information {locks}
St. Walburga Library, Zutphen, Netherlands 1564).
Andrews, William: “Curiosities of the Church: Studies of Curious Customs, Services and Records” (1891)

5. Abyssinian manuscript (ms 134, Goldschmidt no 21) Frankfurt University Library
Bibliotheque Nationale
Binding pages: forming collections systematizing {knowledge}

6. indexing {resources}
Denver Public Library – Horses, biography.
John Allen, “Farewell Cards,” On Wisconsin Magazine, Summer 2012.

7. Internal catalogs → federated catalogs → digital indexing {URIs}

8. accessing {digital objects}

9. traversing {internal structures}
Denver Public Library – Horses, biography.
John Allen, “Farewell Cards,” On Wisconsin Magazine, Summer 2012.

10. integrating {digital surrogates}

11. Are footnotes connections or stops? citing {references}
“A Squib, from Dr. Jortin’s Tabby-Cat,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, (April 1792).

12. CHARON http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_(mythology)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_mythology
From references to graphs traversing {links}

13. William Cunningham,
The Cosmographical Glasse
(John Day, 1559).
Rational
structure

14. a tiny slice of the Internet (showing 5 million edges)
The center will not hold!
To a noisy interconnected universe of knowledge {graph}

15. So what happens to the library?
Philology Library at the Free University of Berlin

16. On the road from DH 1.0 to DH 2.0
monolithic database projects
- custom data models
- custom user interfaces
Patrik Svensson, The Landscape of Digital Humanities
http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html

17. monolithic database projects
- custom data models
- custom user interfaces
open APIs
- machine readable
- metadata and content

18. monolithic database projects
- custom data models
- custom user interfaces
open APIs
- machine readable
- metadata and content
linked open data
- machine readable
- disaggregated
interoperability
- ontologies

19. monolithic database projects
- custom data models
- custom user interfaces
open APIs
- machine readable
- metadata and content
linked open data
- machine readable
- disaggregated
interoperability
- ontologies
open scholarship
- digital publication
- annotation
- interpretation
- curation + narrative
- collaborative
- open-ended

20. Geographic data and the library
Geospatial datasets - GIS

21. Geographic data and the library
Geospatial datasets - GIS
Maps and scanned maps

22. Geographic data and the library
Geospatial datasets - GIS
Maps and scanned maps
The catalog as geodata

23. Geospatial datasets

24. Maps and scanned maps
Federated search system
Digital Repository

25. The catalog as geodata geocoding {topnyms}
651 - Subject Added Entry-Geographic Name
https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=Georgia

26. What to geocode? parsing {tokens}
651 - Geographic Name
260 – Place of Publication
245 – Title

27. Mapping options: georss → openlayers serializing {feeds}
http://goo.gl/UTpwyt

28. Mapping options: json → leaflet Serializing { json }
http://goo.gl/NGLfh6

29. Mapping options: customized from Metacarta geocoding product

30. Mapping options: geoHollis beta demonstration
http://goo.gl/jorMvG

31. Issues raised: geoHollis beta
geocoding
- Identification of placenames in metadata varies in accuracy
- Ambiguous matches cannot be easily fixed
- Geocoding many types of information can be confusing
- No explicit way to match geocoded words to point on map
clustering
- Max number of search results greatly impacts the clusters
- The geocoded words don’t explain how the cluster was decided
facets
- adding and removing facets is essential

32. Moving forward: the semantic web linking data {rdf}
Richard Cyganiak, Linked Open Data Cloud (2011).

33. linking geodata {rdf}

34. Locations in Classical Texts and Atlases
Perseus Project
Pleiades
Google Ancient Places

35. Pelagios - linking historical objects to places - using Pleiades
Pelagios API http://pelagios.dme.ait.ac.at/api
Documentation http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com/
Pleiades

36. Pelagios - linking historical objects to places - using CHGIS
Pelagios API http://pelagios.dme.ait.ac.at/api
Documentation http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com/
Pleiades CHGIS

37. XML web service for Chinese historical placenames:

38. http://chgis.hmdc.harvard.edu/tgaz/apihttp://chgis.hmdc.harvard.edu/xml/
11111
CHGIS Gazetteer Web Service Temporal Gazetteer Web Service
Faceted search web service for historical placenames

39. RDF gazetteer interchange format

40. Potential connections: LOD projects in DH world
Pelagios

41. Implications for the future
Transformation of the catalog:
- metadata describing resources → direct access to digital resources
- users expect instant, machine-readable information
- human readable forms & facets → APIs
- users expect both discovery and deeper analysis of content
- aggregated data and visualizations of data rather than lists
- linked open data and the semantic web will encroach into library science
- graph databases and structures will get applied to search tools
For Geographic data:
- search and visualization using maps will be more commonplace
- catalog metadata will be geocoded (internally or on-the-fly)

42. Map to catalog spatial indexing {metadata}

43. Kalev Leetaru, “Fulltext Geocoding Versus Spatial Metadata for Large Text Archives: Towards a
Geographically Enriched Wikipedia” D-Lib Magazine, (Sep-Oct 2012)
http://goo.gl/VUWsvO
Unbound and linked analyzing {metadata}

44. Interesting examples using spatial search:
- New York Public Library – Maps Division
- Ed Summers ici webmap for wikipedia
- Europeana.eu
- Spatial History Project - Stanford
- Spatial Humantities – Scholar’s Lab - UVA
- MapRankSearch – Klokan Tech
- Digital Silk Road – Stein Placename Database
- GeoCLEF 2008
- Biodiversity of the Hengduan Mountains

45. Bibliography on big data and spatial humanities
https://www.zotero.org/groups/dh_and_big_data/items
Temporal Gazetteers and Linked Geodata
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/gazetteer